Chapter 4
By morning, the strange arrangement between Esa, Imani, and the men taking them to Vathis had acquired rules none of them bothered to state aloud.
Gavin controlled the cart and the route, although his authority extended only as far as the men willing to follow him.
He was a low-ranking Vathis soldier with more ambition than influence, and most of the armed men surrounding the wagon were mercenaries he had hired after the wanted posters began appearing across the eastern settlements.
Ellisar had permitted Gavin to join the broader search for her, but that permission had been loose at best. Other soldiers and scouts were looking for her under more official orders.
Gavin had simply been the one fortunate enough to stumble across her first.
She had to admit, Gavin finding the woman from the posters and personally delivering her to Ellisar could buy him the respect he lacked. The mercenaries, on the other hand, wanted the payment Gavin had promised them, and any advantage might come from being attached to such a valuable discovery.
During the fight, her emotions had stripped away her glamour, yet none of them seemed particularly interested in whether Imani was truly a queen.
A lookalike Crown of Life was not proof merely because people could see one.
Tanyl had to be wearing one too, but a powerful glamour could reproduce roots, flowers, even the appearance of living magic. Sight alone settled nothing.
For now, that made Imani and Esa something between prisoners and protected passengers.
Gavin wanted Imani delivered alive because the posters demanded it, and after Kiran’s attack, he had no intention of risking whatever reward or prestige awaited him in Vathis by allowing anyone to kill her.
Esa remained because Gavin had no reason to separate a dangerous pixie from the woman he was transporting until he could decide what she might also be worth.
Their hands were still bound while the cart moved, but they were given food, water, and space in the wagon rather than treated like condemned captives.
Protection, Imani decided, was an exceedingly generous word for it.
Gavin thought he had captured something valuable but truly had no idea what.
Predatory eyes tracked Esa and Imani in the cart all morning.
The weight of those stares clung to Imani’s skin like an oily residue, measuring her worth in coin and flesh.
Disgust curled her lip as a Norn elf openly leered at her.
“I’ll rip your eyes out if you look at me again,” she snarled.
The man merely chuckled, turning away with a dismissive smirk. He wasn’t afraid of her. To him, she was entertainment, not a threat. But he should have been afraid. He should have sensed the rigid, unyielding power radiating from her. It was a darkness that refused to bend.
When Gavin called a halt for the midday meal, the thin discipline holding his hired men together began to fray.
One of the mercenaries pulled Imani away from the cart to behind a massive oak, separating her from Esa without waiting for Gavin’s permission.
They tossed her a meager ration of bread and meat.
The Norn stood watch. Wind ruffled his short silver hair, but his blue eyes—so jarringly similar to Imani’s—remained fixed on her chest. His gaze should have been idle, yet it was invasive.
“I’ll tell you what I told the other asshole,” Imani warned, her voice dropping to a dangerous register. “I’ll rip your eyes out if you look at me again.”
The fiend just stood there, grinning like a tomcat cornering a mouse.
“That look,” he hissed. “I think I love it. Reminds me of your wanted posters. Will you glare at me like that when I rut you, I wonder? Or will you make savory little noises? I do hope it’s both. ” He took a lazy pull from his flask.
Imani held his gaze, offering him nothing—no flinch, no shift in posture, no fear. But deep in her chest, a slow coil of tension wound tighter, born of lethal restraint.
“Are you really the queen? You sure don’t seem like one right now.”
“Who do you think took out the Niflheim king’s soldiers with those tree roots, you imbecile?”
He shrugged, unimpressed. “Could’ve just been the Draswood. I think we need to run some tests before taking you to Ellisar as the false queen.” He cupped his mouth and shouted toward the rest of the camp. “Don’t you agree, boys!?”
“Aye!” they hollered back. The chorus was far too eager.
The Norn drew a knife. The blade caught the dappled sunlight in a sharp, cruel flash.
A ragged scream tore through the camp from Esa’s direction.
“What are you doing to my friend?” Imani growled. The words were low, yet they carried a crushing physical weight, pressing outward into the clearing.
Esa screamed again.
Shadow surged instinctively beneath Imani’s skin. With a snarl, she almost let it loose.
The image of the fractured moss and splitting earth from the previous day stopped her.
Her shadows had barely touched the Draswood before the ground reacted.
Here, with the Fabric already strained and whatever unseen magic had been cutting through the forest still active, a full attack could do far more than kill the men around her.
It could tear open another rupture… another Fabric event.
Imani could not risk that, even for Esa.
Her hands curled against the bindings until the rope cut deeper into her wrists.
If Gavin really meant to take them to Ellisar, then surviving the journey still gave her a path forward.
She could endure this long enough to reach Vathis.
She could make Ellisar listen. If she could convince him that an alliance served both, she would have something stronger than a handful of dead mercenaries and another wounded stretch of forest.
So, she forced the shadows back down, but waiting felt worse than fighting. She glared at the Norn grinning at her. “I asked you what you were doing to her?” she repeated.
“Making her prove her worth. Just as we’re going to do with you.”
“What does that mean?” Imani strained against her bindings. They had moved her hands to the front so she could eat, but the ropes were tied so tightly that the coarse hemp bit deep into her raw wrists.
“It means we’re going to see if that little pixie can score us some Nightmare Dust.”
Imani’s stomach turned. Esa could produce it, but using enough to kill in the middle of the Draswood would be another matter entirely.
Pixie magic had already triggered one of the hidden threads and cracked the soil beneath them.
Esa knew it too. However furious she was, she would not dump a lethal concentration of Nightmare Dust into a Draswood already struggling to hold the Fabric together.
“And for you?” He smacked his lips. “Well, you might not be wearing that fake Crown of Life by the time I’m through with you.”
She reached up with both bound hands and rubbed a petal between her fingers, but pressed her mouth into a hard line.
As he stepped closer, he forced Imani to crane her neck to keep him in sight. The movement exposed her throat, but she didn’t shrink back. “If you try to sever any part of this crown from my head, you will die. I am not bluffing.”
He laughed outright. “See, I don’t think you’re really her, even if Gavin does. And he’s a bit busy torturing your friend right now to care what I do.”
“Why would he condone you torturing me, then?” she ground out, friction burning her skin as she fought the ropes.
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Besides, I’m far more afraid of Ellisar than of you—and who knows what he’ll do to us if we bring him a fake.”
Even miles away, Ellisar’s presence loomed. His very name was a boundary line these men dreaded crossing. It was the silent anchor beneath their arrogance.
The Norn lunged. He grabbed a fistful of the living roots woven into Imani’s scalp and yanked her head back.
She screamed as the sharp blade bit in, shearing through the wood.
The agony was blinding. It felt like being flayed alive, a visceral echo of her grandmother’s cruelty when Imani had been younger.
It cut past her skin, plunging deep into old memories of being controlled and altered against her will.
Then, her scalp began to burn.
At first, the heat merely dulled the pain. But as it spread beneath her skin, something ancient and terrible rose to meet it.
Imani bared her teeth at the Norn, and she began to laugh.
A beautiful, intoxicating floral scent suddenly bloomed in the air, pouring from the blossoms woven through the living branches of her crown. The response came the instant he cut into the crown, spreading outward on its own.
Growing tension in the camp became a dull roar as the mercenary above her inhaled first. His knife dropped as his body seized and his breath hitched in wet, uneven bursts.
The poison did not stop with him. Four of the men clustered nearest Imani began choking almost simultaneously, close enough to have breathed the same concentrated floral cloud before anyone understood what was happening.
Men only a few yards away stumbled backward, covering their mouths and noses as the scent thinned between the trees.
Across the camp, Gavin abandoned whatever he had been doing to Esa and hurried toward the commotion. He stopped several yards from Imani when he saw the bodies, remaining beyond the last traces of the floral haze.
“What’s the meaning of—” His voice died.
Imani’s captor stumbled backward, clutching his throat. “She’s… she’s really her,” he choked out. “The queen.” His eyes rolled back, and he hit the forest floor, dead.
Gavin stared in horror at the corpses suddenly littering his camp.
Five men were dead, and although she had not consciously killed a single one of them, she let him think she had.